Media Ownership Review Won't Wrap Until 2012

摘要

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski last week unveiled the agency's preliminary plan for a retrospective regulatory review that it agreed to come up with at the request of the White House, saying its quadrennial media ownership regulations review won't be done until next year. The plan also managed to promote spectrum reclamation, a drumbeat out of the FCC for many months. The media ownership review had been delayed while a federal court was mulling challenges to the FCC's last attempt to change the rules back in 2007, and then-FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's loosening of the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban. The court wound up throwing out that decision in July because it failed to meet proper notice and comment requirements for the change and remanded it back to the commission. The court upheld Martin's decision not to loosen any other ownership rules.